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Innovation: Cracking the Code

An unscientific survey of what managers ask and say about Innovation shows the volume of serious advice rapidly increasing but managers still losing ground. Maybe the advice needs to be simpler and more consistent.

Innovation: Cracking the Code

2.
Innovation is Annoying
It’s annoying because it is risky, confusing, and it hurts when someone
else beats you to it with a good one.
And, it takes longer to explain it than to do it, but so often they won’t
let you do it unless you can explain it first.
Plus, there’s the language barrier. Why do so many of the words in the
“innovation” vocabulary make the logic fuzzier instead of clearer?
Maybe it’s time for a do-over.

4.
Innovation is not Optional
Innovation is not optional. Okay fine. But given the way things are talked about today, you’d think
there should be an innovative approach to innovating, which of course would result in… an
innovation.
We could go on, but let’s not.
Instead, let’s just admit that “an innovation” is a result; and when a result is an innovation, there
might still have been a lot of different ways, even old ones, that we might have gotten there.
Since results arise from lots of different kinds of efforts, we can find innovations in lots of different
arenas.
Maybe the real issue of innovation is to know where to look for it, and how to know it when we see
it. We all want to know how to make them. What if we’re already really close to getting them done
and just don’t know it?
Anyway, it seems like there is still a lot of room to think about things differently. Possibly more
simply.

5.
Spaghetti Code
Some people are alive today who are old enough to not only have heard of “spaghetti code”, but to
have actually seen it, been victimized by it, or even take the blame for making it.
Good spaghetti code wasn’t non-functional; but it was really hard to use unless it was your own and
you had a great memory. With spaghetti code, you knew what your code meant and why it worked,
but very few other people did or could. That is, your way of describing how things worked was
simply not very helpful.
Lots and lots of people decided that spaghetti code was a bad way to continue working together.
They started unraveling the spaghetti piles, and stopped making more of them. They decided to
organize, use and describe code specifically in ways that made it more shareable.
Structured code turned out to be really useful. People all understood it the same way, and still got
to make as much of their own distinctive stuff as they liked.
Hmmm.

6.
The Who Cares Test
Innovation matters because it changes our current conditions.
Naturally we want it to be beneficial, and we’d like to use it for our own purposes.
In fact, after any excitement, strangeness or surprise of an innovation dies down, its
utility turns out to be what always matters.
What we all want to understand, in the same way, about an “innovation” is how it
turns into something that we want to use.
To do that, it’s reasonable to account for “an innovation” from its origination (when
we get a possibility of using it) to its end (when we stop using it).

10.
Planning versus Improvising
The vast majority of useful innovations result from
change management and integration within and
across the stages of utility progression -- driven by art,
problem-solving and competition, all of which are
familiar and can be taught.
Intuition
Collaboration
Creativity
Meanwhile: Intuition, Inspiration, Insight, Creativity,
Ideation, Collaboration… these are all the language of
the pursuit of intentionality – a recognizable
preoccupation with “causality” and “management”.
Put simply, these popular generic terms are meant to
describe the conditions-plus-controls of what happens
in the overall workspace regarding innovation…
management looks for conditions-plus-controls that
are likely to increase the chance of preferred
outcomes occurring.
However, too many of these popular capabilities are
thought to be unteachable. Worse, many of the terms
actually fail, beyond describing things, to explain. Even
so, they still amount to a form of accountability.
Inspiration
Insight
Managers may wonder if repeatedly producing the same type of
conditions and controls, in the same areas, might regenerate the
same outcomes. But the important realization about intentionality
is that most, if not all, of its variety of conditions and controls can
apply to any stage in the overall progression, and to any step in the
stages. There may be no standing “formula”.

11.
Structured Code
Any step in any of the stages is independently subject to variability and even permanent change.
This diversity is also what accounts for the huge range of types of effects that, regardless of circumstantial
worth, may turn out to be innovations. They result as conceptual, material, structural, procedural, or
situational innovations – separately, and potentially in combinations with each other.
The alignment of instances and types of innovation is sometimes coincidental but can be intentional.
Orchestrating the individual results to co-operate in progression is potentially critical to the attributed value
of any step or stage. This is entirely familiar to us within such disciplines as composing, programming,
modeling, design, and architecture.
The overall “workspace” of the progressions includes numerous stages and steps. This makes it clear that
innovations having intrinsic value can surface in many ways -- whereupon they are resources available to
contribute to given contexts either immediately or at a later time.
This is why having them in an internal portfolio, as well as an ability to acquire them from external sources,
are both practices to maintain within the constraints of sustainable investment. Meanwhile, it is clear that
innovations in orchestration itself can be a primary strategy for leveraging already-existing results – whether
they are innovations or not – to provide new value.

13.
Impact, Value and Worth
When a result becomes normalized within a community, its difference (its included transformation) may
have an overall impact that proves to be dramatic – both within that community and as an influence on
other communities.
But the probability of this happening may be difficult to determine.
As a familiar example, a solution adoption by one party may become a proof of concept that triggers
broad acceptance by other parties and the proliferation of the next “normal”. But this is not what always
happens. Often the reasons why it does or does not are suspected only through historical precedent, or
confirmed only in hindsight.
A new state-of-the-art may or may not become a new standard-of-practice.
A new paradigm may or may not become the new orthodoxy.
A transformative effect may or may not become disruptive.
What is always true, however, is that the results that we care about are ones that make a difference; the
type of difference is the inherent value; and the benefit-versus-risk that the difference generates in a
given context is its worth.
A breakthrough that allows for faster running counts for a lot more on dry land than it does in a
swimming pool.

14.
Notes
• Innovation is a systemic effect that occurs at different scales and granularities of effort
• Multiple types of innovation can occur independently of each other, and outcomes that
are one type of innovation may or may not require innovations of other types
• Many disciplines already successfully supply and leverage techniques that orchestrate
and manage change to generate value
• Modeling a collection of capabilities (conditions-plus-controls) may explain a prior
success without predicting a future one; acquiring capabilities may be necessary yet
insufficient
• Utility is the primary pre-determinant of the value and worth of an innovation; the
“availability” of utility progresses from discovery to renovation
• Future utility is valid as well as current utility, but it is subject to the current sustainability
of investment